MONTREAL, CANADA.- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents John Oswald Instandstillnessence, on view through August 14, 2005 at the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion. Lately, artists’ longstanding interest in ways of projecting images has reached an unprecedented scale with the advent of a host of new technologies – video tape, holography, virtual imaging and so on. All these technologies have contributed to a plastic erupting of the image, as well as to its social and theoretical repositioning. From its former confinement on the TV and movie screen, the projected image has moved onto the walls of museums and galleries, bringing about its metamorphoses as a work of art.

The recent “chronophotic” installations of John Oswald, including instandstillnessence, are among the most original instances of this mutation of the image. An artist who resists any form of artistic categorization, Oswald conceived of a new genre somewhere between photography and cinema – or rather at the place where they intersect – that would provide a most unusual experience of the image. To achieve his purpose, Oswald compiled a computer file from hundreds of photographs of people, all taken from the front twice – once dressed and once naked. Grouped, superimposed, arranged in uninterrupted succession, these images are projected life-size onto the wall.

The result is a cinematic spectacle of a crowd whose transformation is so slow that it is at first glance imperceptible. This humanity is in constant revolution (evolution?) as individuals replace one another in a seemingly endless cross-fade. We are stared at in a face-to-face encounter that is all the more riveting in that each person’s clothes are removed before our eyes. Oswald speaks of an “ephemeral transparent community occupying a light fresco”.

In instandstillnessence, John Oswald propels the image into a peculiar system that is neither the succession of freeze-frames of Chris Marker’s short film The Pier (1962) – a standard reference – nor, at the other extreme, the frenzied animation of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982). As Oswald puts it, “Chronophotics” – a word coined from the Greek chronos (time) and phôtos (light) – “is the genre of stills which are not quite still and movies which never move.” A paradoxical, even spiritual system, since it shows us a humanity at once immobile and moving, fleshly and ghostly, unreally serene.

Multidisciplinary artist John Oswald is one of the most original figures on the Canadian art scene. He is particularly well known in the field of music. His “Plunderphonics”, a genre he created in 1985, made him a cult figure of alternative music, and his compositions have been performed by musicians and orchestras worldwide. In 2004, Musicworks Magazine proclaimed “Oswald is the future of music.” His more recent visual work earned him the 2004 Governor General’s Prize for media art. This is his first exhibition in Montreal.